American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Convention Issue 2025 A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Eighty-Five Years and Counting
by Deborah Kent Stein
For six jam-packed days, from July 8 to 13, some three thousand blind people of all ages and backgrounds gathered at the Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in New Orleans for the annual convention of the National Federation of the Blind. The lobby echoed with the tapping of thousands of long white canes. Old friends greeted one another in the registration line, and strangers became acquainted as they waited for the next elevator to arrive.
The 2025 NFB National Convention marked a milestone in the history of the organized blind movement. Nearly eighty-five years before, on November 16, 1940, a group of blind leaders from seven states convened at the Reddington Hotel in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. “Everybody who came wanted to have a national organization,” founding President Jacobus tenBroek said in a speech years later. “It wasn’t a matter of some people having the idea and converting others. The only discussion really was over the mechanics of it and how to implement it, set it up. But everybody was agreed, apparently, before arriving, that the time had come to set up a national organization.”
Delegates from seven states attended the founding NFB convention. The original sixteen delegates represented California, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They drafted a constitution that laid out the framework for the organization that has grown stronger year by year.
The founders believed without question in the ability of blind people to manage their own lives. They saw the new organization as a body that would forge opportunities and fight for equal rights for blind people throughout the United States. Above all, they believed that blind people should speak for themselves.
This year the annual convention of the National Federation of the Blind was an extravaganza of exhibits, workshops, presentations, and fun for blind people of all ages, along with our families and friends.
Exhibitors demonstrated the latest wonders of technology that can promote learning and enhance our quality of life. Delegates voted on resolutions that will determine the organization’s policy on a variety of issues in the years ahead. At the annual convention banquet, NFB President Mark Riccobono delivered a thought-provoking address, “Creativity, Persistence, and Hope: Reclaiming Our Stories through the Organized Blind Movement.” You can read it in full at https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/
bm/bm25/bm2508/bm250805.htm.
The National Organization of Parents of Blind Children (NOPBC) hosted talks and workshops throughout convention week. Teens had fun and developed leadership skills through a week of Youth Track activities. Children played and learned at NFB Kids’ Camp. They even got a hands-on introduction to a live alligator named Elvis.
The articles in this Convention issue of Future Reflections can give you only a taste of the convention experience. We hope you will join us in person next summer in Austin, Texas, for Convention 2026!
The sixteen delegates to that first convention in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, could never have imagined the joyfully chaotic scene in the lobby of the New Orleans Marriott or pictured the convention agenda with its dazzling array of options. Surely, they would have been thrilled to know that the movement they began on that Saturday in November has grown and flourished. We can only dare to imagine what the next eighty-five years may bring!